The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
Ideas shape the course of history.
The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.
Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
In the long run we are all dead.
There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world.
When the facts change, I change my mind.
If farming were to be organised like the stock market, a farmer would sell his farm in the morning when it was raining, only to buy it back in the afternoon when the sun came out.
Economics is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions.
Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
Once doubt begins it spreads rapidly.
The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.
If you owe your banker a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe your banker a million pounds, he is at your mercy.
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.
Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis, and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.
Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes a bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done.